Preview: CBRX Season 2 Civ Colors and Map Changes – S1

Coiot: Hello everyone, thank you all for the wonderful feedback we've recieved the two weeks following the conclusion of Season 1 of CBRX. The team has been working on Season 2 since late January, and our early efforts and planning have resulted in a great development flow and this upcoming Season will truly bring some new excitment and a variety of new improvments to enchance the viewer experience both while viewing the episodes and afterwards on the subreddit and Discord server.

This week the team wants to start off showing the color changes necessitated by the inevitable color contrast clashes around the map and also the extensive changes done to the map itself. This Season we really wanted to minimize the amount of changes to the colors in direct response to our approach the previous Season. The result is an overall more subtle approach to color changes that retain the original look and feel of all the civs mods that had to get a fresh coat of paint. On the other hand, after having now run two Royale games (three if you count S1 Endgame), we knew we had to make extensive changes to the map in order to help the game run better and for the civs to perform better within it as well. We've been able to take lessons learned from the last three years since the start of Mk 2.1 to create a map that will result in a better environment for the civs to fight over with. But first, the color changes.

The Neutral Nation was the first civ to have their colors changed after the team took the opportunity to distance the mod away from the Futurama memes and help it be differentiated from Iceland. The orange used is Osage Orange in a nod to Gragg's Osage mod (it also looks much nicer like this).

The Teutons still clashed with the dark background of Iceland, so the team sought out mod author Uighur_Caesar to pick from amongst a few possible color schemes to help them stand out. A sharply constrasted Black on Grey fits right into their look.

The Vandals recieve a slight saturation change so that the civ will not conflict with Marajoara and its immediate neighbors.

Laos or Vietnam had to be changed due to very approximate hue similarites, so the team sought a simple color flip of its primary and secondary colors to keep the color combination intact.

Yuan recieves a big boost in background sautration and a new primary color that is a more different hue than the original primary. This new color scheme will help the audience tell them apart from the Chukchi to their north.

Jerusalem has only a small saturation change in response to the similar color combination of Georgia immediately to the north of them.

Likewise, Georgia recieves a slight desaturation to move them away from Jerusalem’s new colorscheme even further. Subtle, but effective.

Wales’ original colorscheme had two strongly contrasting colors that made their text difficult to see, and for certain audience members with colorblind conditions, almost impossible to tell apart. The team sought to keep the colors the same while changing the two hues to help with the contrast and improve readability while still remaining distinctively Welsh.

Bhutan is another mod the team requested a straight-forward color flip between its primary and secondary. The flip does well to make them stand out amongst the other yellow-orange colors of South Asia.

Punjab receives a slight hue change to retain the emblematic Punjab color scheme. The team would like the assure everyone that the change is sufficient for all three South Asian civs to be distinct on the minimap and on screen.

Tongva's brighter primary color is in response to needing some more variation between other dark-red background civs (Germany, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, etc.). The brighter primary looks great in its immeidate region and allows for no confusion elsewhere.

Jamaica's saturation change started as a hunt to see which of all the green civs voted this season—there are so many—could be changed to help with on-screen and map comparisons. Jamaica's new colors resembles the saturation of its IRL flag closely while looking quite distinct to the other green civs on the map.

Likewise, Japan is another green civ sought after to recieve a color change. Mod author Homusubi personally recommened the new pink primary. The team finds it to be very fashionable.

Last on the color changes list is a very recent change. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Chukchi in tests were not contrasting well enough with each other, resulting in confusion. An easy color flip for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom solves the conflict.

Here is an overall view of how the colors compare with each other across the map. There may not be the most expectional variety, but the contrasts work well enough together and the team was able to keep changes at a minimum and close to the original colorschemes wherever possible. Expect to love how these colors will paint the in-game map in the near future.

Lime: Our new map is 120 by 80, note that this means we have shrunk the map a little bit to help with turn times and stability. To do so, with the wonderful help of FionaDanger/Lungora, we've shrunk both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, while simultaneously reducing the size of the Arctic, with the intention of reducing random unit spam and battles in the far northern reaches of the world. Obviously, shrinking the two major oceans on the cylinder requires the land in the middle to be compacted as well, so Greenland, the area near the Bering Strait and the Pacific Ocean islands have all either been shrunk appropriately or removed. In addition to those changes, Southeast Asia and Hawaii have been slightly expanded to better accommodate the civs that will be starting there (Laos, Vietnam and Hawai'i). This is a tactic we have employed in the past (see: Nazca) to great success at keeping the game balanced. Finally, North Africa and Western Australia were made more habitable, since civs in those regions were significantly underperforming due to the swathes of desert.

Lunar has then placed resources around the map. Our approach here was to provide every civ with somewhat of a strategic start, with early game resources immediately available near their capital and then more late game resources available farther away from their capital. Then, unique luxuries are also roughly equally distributed for each civilization.

Unfortunately, these changes do prevent us from getting perfect real-world accuracy, but we think this is a worthy compromise (as we also thought for S1) to provide a more stable, entertaining game. Hope you enjoy! Welcome to ask more specific questions in the comments below, I (Lime) will try to answer them as best as I can.

Coiot: Those are all the updates for this week. Next week we'll be showcasing all the new mods specifically addressing Religion. Religion will be a big factor in Season 2, and we invested quite a few resources making it more interesting and impactful in the early stages of the game. Come back next Wednesday for all the details on the sub.